Thursday, June 26, 2014

Jun

26

June 1944

We stared after them: trying to comprehend the actuality of our enemies. A Regimental Provost corporal, taking charge of one, flicked him contemptuously across the shoulders with his driving-gauntlets, rearwards. And morale soared. Prisoners already! Things must be going well. The sight did a world of good to the younger ones among us, upon whom the strain of composure had been beginning to tell.

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The second volume of this superb overview of the whole war.
You had to eat somewhere, sleep somewhere and occasionally you felt a desperate need to talk to someone, even though you were aware that to do so could be dangerous, if not fatal. Boredom was, in fact, a menace that no one was taught to contend with at the training school. Boredom was something individuals had to deal with themselves, and it cost quite a few men and women their lives when they came up with the wrong solution.
The Tigers were over-engineered, required raw materials that were in short supply, were time-consuming to manufacture and difficult to recover from the battlefield. Only around 1,300 of the Tiger I and fewer than 500 of the Tiger II were produced, so they were never going to make anything more than a local impact on the outcome of the fighting on the Western and Eastern fronts. Yet the myth of the Tigers, with their 88mm guns, thick armour and brutal profiles, has grown over time to the extent that they are regarded as the deadliest tanks of the Second World War.